SimScale Platform Update 05/2015: Larger Solid Mechanics Simulation

New Viewer Functionality

Depending on the simulation type you are setting up, the interaction with the CAD model or mesh is an important part of your work. Especially for viewer intensive interactions such as the setup of contact constraints, the scene tree now allows to toggle the visibility of single parts or faces via a dedicated button. This speeds up certain picking processes significantly.

The scene tree on the right now allows toggling the visibility of CAD model or Mesh entities.

Furthermore, the coordinate system icon in the lower left can now be used to align the 3D scene to one of the axis directions. Additional functionality for the viewer is already under development – stay tuned.

The coordinate system icon now allows to align the scene to one of the axis directions

New Boundary Condition Concept

Probably the most powerful new feature is the way how boundary condition types are now structured. From now on, there are boundary condition types available that define all physical quantities on a given face of the domain. In other words, where you earlier needed up to 20 single boundary conditions, you’ll need from now on only two or three to run your simulation. A practical example is shown in the image below. It shows a turbulent, incompressible flow simulation using a k-Omega-SST turbulence model, created with just two boundary conditions.

Larger Solid Mechanics Simulations Possible

New numerical as well as infrastructural features do now allow the setup of even larger finite element/ solid mechanics simulations. Advanced time stepping methods help to efficiently carry out dynamic and nonlinear solid mechanics simulation setups and new memory allocation mechanisms ensure that very large meshes can be handled. As an example have a look at this highly dynamic simulation of a valve train:

Simulation of a valve train at different rotation speeds.

New Validation and Example Simulation Projects with the SimScale Platform

Each week, thousands of simulation jobs are carried out on the SimScale platform from users in many different industry verticals analyzing all sorts of products and applications. To accelerate their learning process and simulation setup time, our team added yet another set of validation and example projects. You can simply import them via the public project library and get access to the complete simulation setup to derive your own analysis.

As always, we are very interested in your feedback. If you have any suggestions for the further development of the SimScale platform, please reach out to us via the comments section or via support@simscale.com.

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David Heiny

Co-founder and Managing Director at SimScale. Excited about HPC and CAE technology.